God is the answer to all the questions that science can’t answer, so God, like science, is here to stay.

Tony Benn

All the founders of the great religions taught the same thing: “Treat other people as you want to be treated yourself.” You will find it in every religion and on trade union banners alike.

That aspect of religion unites the world. It is the leaders of religion that divide the world.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

God for me is whispering conscience. I pray every day wherever I am. I can’t often break through the ritual and worldly thoughts but there are moments when I am filled with a sense of another world beyond ours. Death is not the end. My faith gives me that assurance.

I find it difficult to conceive of a “God”, either as an image, or as a real force, to attach my religiosity to – I waver between thinking that the religious sensibility is only genetic and cultural, and thinking that there may be something, still, beyond nature and culture; an ungendered force similar to Thomas Aquinas’s concept of the “unmoved mover”, the cause of time, matter and space. I don’t think of it as a force which is personally involved in our lives.

I do, however, think of prayer as a form of meditation through which you can reach a state of stillness, or acceptance, or grace, which may or may not be connected to the force which may or may not exist.

Graham Linehan

Man in a beard, white hair, sits on a throne on a cloud, tells people whether they’ve been naughty or nice, doesn’t like women.

Howard Jacobson

I don’t know what people mean when they say they don’t believe in God. In which God don’t they believe? There is an incontrovertible God of history as well as a personal God of faith, someone to whom, in one guise or another, people have been talking, in reverence or in rage, for time immemorial. You can’t just close that conversation. Civilised colloquy has included God for too long to drop him now on a mere passing whim of disbelief. The great mistake of those who don’t believe is to leave God to those who do.

Marina Mahathir

I grew up thinking of God as the biggest, most powerful, smartest and richest being there is . . . but also most definitely male. It took a long time to realise that God has no gender and that the Quran says that He or She takes men and women into equal consideration.

That realisation has been very liberating for a Muslim woman like me. Patriarchy is a human creation, not God’s.

Polly Toynbee

The idea of God is a danger to reason and humanity – a sentimental lie, a self-imposed oppression, an excuse for abusing women and a battle cry for tribal culture wars.

Phillip Blond

For secular atheists God has nothing to do with any desirable human objective or hope.

Yet the fact remains that Christianity was the first human universalism and the first purely human politics to assert radical equality regardless of race, sex or class. So for me Christianity is a measure against which all human activity is to be judged and made meaningful and good.

Yiyun Li

China in the 1970s was an atheist country, but my grandfather used to say to my sister and me, “Three feet above your head are the eyes of God.” The very powerful chairwoman of the neighbourhood association used to lead young men to our door after midnight to look for American spies – my grandfather and both his sons had fought against the Communists – and the heavy poundings on our door at night had become a nightmare. Many years later, the chairwoman slipped in the rain and became permanently paralysed. My mother, upon hearing the news, sighed. “Remember

Grandpa used to say that three feet above your head are the eyes of God?” she said. “You should believe him now.” That was perhaps my only contact with the idea of God while growing up: for those who wait long enough, the eyes above would not fail us.

Anthony Giddens

Pass – too cosmic for me.

Kwame Kwei-Armah

The concept of God, of a creator, simply equals “continuity” to me. That there is something greater than wo/man. That in some unfathomable way most things are connected and that the higher self has something to measure itself by – to aspire to. God is not for me some old man with a white beard and a Barry White bass, but something I see in nearly everyone I meet.

Peter Mandelson

I don’t do God.

Chief Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks

God, for me, represents the holiness of otherness. Through an encounter with the divine Other I come to value the encounter with the human other. What I ask God to do for me, God asks me to do for others: listen to them, empower them, believe in them, trust them, forgive them when they betray that trust, and love them for what they are, not what I would like them to be. More than we have faith in God, God has faith in us, and because he never loses that faith, we can never lose hope. God is the redemption of solitude.

Roger Scruton

God is the self-created Creator of all things, who is a person like you and me, the fount of love, the judge of human action and the refuge of all who suffer.

Camila Batmanghelidjh

My idea of God is when you are so diminished as an individual that in your nothingness you can participate in the whole. The best expression for it is an awe of vaster possibilities than those permitted in one person.

Martin Rowson

God means about as much to me as the personification of any other ideology I don’t happen to endorse, be it Ba’athism, Stalinism or the dicta of the Liberal Democrats. But I suppose it depends which God or gods you mean: are we talking about the externalisation of a common human sense of the numinous, or the psychotic sky-god Yahweh and his hegemonic avatars, Jehovah and Allah? If it’s the latter, I see him, her, it or them as a combination of the Wizard of Oz, a paper tiger, a teddy bear and a tab of Valium, invented and utilised by cunning priests and kings to keep the rest of us in a state of grateful terror. And if you accept God into your heart as nothing more than an ancient political construct, it’s almost impossible not to reach the same conclusion as Bakunin when he upended Voltaire: “If God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.”

Ann Widdecombe

God is the first cause, the Creator, who made the universe. That is the God who is close to me as I walk on Dartmoor and see the glory of His creation all around me. He is a God of love, but also a demanding God. I look at the lives of the saints and martyrs and consider what they suffered and am glad that, whereas they faced the stake, the worst I am likely to have to cope with is a grilling from Jeremy Paxman.

Martyn Atkins, general secretary of the British Methodist Church

As a young convert to Christianity, I took Jesus Christ as my focus, my “way in” to God. He was my inspiration and still is. Over time this focus on Jesus was broadened and enhanced by an increasing awareness and appreciation of God as creator, sustainer, divine caring parent. In more recent times the Holy Spirit becomes ever more important to me. She fires my spirit, brings grace and humour, energy and passion into my life.

George Monbiot

God is a self-justifying myth available for all occasions. He justifies whatever course of action you wish to take. If you want to smite the Gideonites, Midianites, Amorites and Ammonites, all you need is God. If you want to invade Iraq, he’s given you prior clearance. You want to blow up a train? Fly a plane into a skyscraper? He’s there for you. It’s true there are some people – a small minority – who use their conception of God to create a better moral code. But they are greatly outnumbered by those who have used it to excuse every form of venal, grasping, brutal and murderous behaviour. God is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

Rabbi Dame Julia Neuberger

I don’t believe God is describable in human terms, nor that She/He is able to intervene in human affairs – after all, we have been given free will (by God) – but I believe God is the ultimate Creator, above and beyond us, as well as the still small voice inside us, giving us the possibility, and often the prod, to do good.

Rachel Billington

A few years ago I wrote a Life of Jesus for

child readers. It made me realise that my Catholicism was based on my idea of Jesus, not on God. This is partly because at school we were never encouraged to read the Old Testament and all the religious teaching was based on the New Testament. This didn’t mean we disbelieved in God, because Jesus was God made man, but that we didn’t feel the need to dwell on the Father as much as the Son.

For good or ill, this approach has stayed with me. Probably it reflects my practical – I nearly said “down-to-earth” – approach to my religious life. I have never been good on abstractions, just as in my novel-writing, I like to deal in reality – or at least reality as I see it. On the other hand, I am not at all worried and indeed enjoy being aware of things that I don’t understand. In fact, I admire them – like a Latin unseen or Anglo-Saxon verse that I can’t translate properly but still recognise as a great work.

The closest I get to God is through art and nature – Beethoven’s late string quartets or the beauty of the Dorset countryside. I would be utterly bereft if I stopped believing in the hand of God. On the other hand, Jesus is my leader, with the Holy Ghost lurking inspiringly. The Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Ghost is another of those mysteries. Brilliant, and maybe even more brilliant for being beyond human understanding.

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